Kendo: rules, armor, and the difference from kenjutsu

Have you heard of the martial art called kendo? The name reads, literally, as "way of the sword." People practice it in Japan, Brazil, the United States, South Korea, and across Europe. Training uses a bamboo shinai and a set of armor called bogu. The lightsaber fights in Star Wars drew on kendo.

On March 20, 1975, the All Japan Kendo Federation published the Concept of Kendo. The concept is to discipline the human character through the application of the principles of the katana. A dojo pursues that aim with the shinai, the bogu, and the match.

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Origin of kendo

The striking practice behind kendo took shape in the Edo period, inside schools that already taught the sword. In the Shotoku era (1711-1715), Naganuma Shirozaemon Kunisato of the Jikishin Kage-ryu spread uchikomi training: partners struck one another with a bamboo shinai while wearing protection. In the Horeki era (1751-1764), Nakanishi Chuzo Tsugutake of the Itto-ryu added an iron men and bamboo armor, and other schools took up the same method. Later in the Edo period the yotsuwari shinai, made from four bamboo slats, replaced the older fukuro shinai, a bamboo sword wrapped in leather.

The Meiji Restoration ended the samurai class as a legal status and prohibited wearing swords in public, so the old schools lost the place they had held. The Dai Nippon Butokukai, founded in 1895, took on the work of keeping martial arts in public use. In 1912 the Dai Nippon Teikoku Kendo Kata, later renamed Nihon Kendo Kata, gathered techniques from those schools so shinai practice would still follow the cutting line of a Japanese sword. The All Japan Kendo Federation's published history marks 1912 as the first official use of the word kendo, in that kata. In 1919 Nishikubo Hiromichi brought kenjutsu and gekken under the single name kendo, the way of the sword.

After Japan's defeat in 1945, the Allied occupation banned kendo. When sovereignty returned in 1952, the All Japan Kendo Federation was established, and kendo returned as budo and as part of school physical education. In 1970 the International Kendo Federation, today the FIK, was founded, and the first World Kendo Championships were held at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo. In schools it sits with the other Japanese martial arts.

How is kendo practiced?

Official matches follow the Regulations of Kendo Shiai and Shinpan of the International Kendo Federation, revised on July 26, 2023. Federations affiliated with the FIK run individual matches and team matches. A team is usually five competitors. The side with more individual winners takes the match. When the number of wins is equal, the side with more points wins, and one representative from each side can fight the tie.

A local shiai uses the same targets as a championship. You still watch the shinai, the bogu, and the four places a strike can count.

Main rules of kendo

• The standard match lasts five minutes. An extension, encho, lasts three minutes. Those five minutes leave out the pause after a point is announced and the pause after the referee stops the match.
• The usual format is sanbon-shobu. The first competitor to score two points wins. One point also wins when time runs out and the opponent has scored none. If the score is still level, encho goes to the first new point. A tournament may instead decide by hantei, the referees' judgment of skill and attitude, or by another method announced in advance. Some events use ippon-shobu and end on a single point.
• The announced point is an ippon. It has to be a yuko-datotsu: an accurate strike or thrust on a legal target, made with the datotsu-bu of the shinai, the striking section on the side opposite the cord, with the correct cutting angle, hasuji, with correct posture, and with zanshin after the hit.
• The court, the shiai-jo, is a square or a rectangle of 9 to 11 meters on a side, counting the line, and the floor is normally wood. A foot fully outside the line, or a fall outside it, is jogai and counts as hansoku, a foul. Two hansoku award one point to the opponent.
• Each competitor wears a red or white mejirushi, a cloth strip 70 centimeters long and 5 centimeters wide, folded where the do cords cross on the back. The referees use the color to tell the two sides apart.
• Three referees conduct the match: the shushin, the chief, and two fukushin. They shift around the court so a strike can be seen from more than one angle. The point stands when at least two of the three recognize it.

Main strikes of kendo

Four zones can be scored. The name of the strike is the place the shinai lands.

• Men: the forehead or either temple, on the men.
• Kote: the left or right forearm, on the glove.
• Do: the left or right side of the torso protector.
• Tsuki: a thrust to the throat protector.

The match rules call the armor kendo-gu. In the dojo it is bogu, and it has four pieces. The men covers the face, the throat, and the shoulders. The kote cover the hands and at least half of each forearm. The do covers the chest and the abdomen. The tare covers the hips and the groin, and the name tag, the nafuda, sits on its center panel. A hit on the tare does not score.

Kendo and kenjutsu

Kenjutsu is the sword technique of the old schools, the ryu. Kendo grew from the training those schools built once a shinai and armor made full-contact practice possible. The 1912 kata exist so a shinai match still has to respect the cut of a Japanese sword.

In a kendo shiai the weapon in the hand is a shinai of bamboo, or a synthetic shinai the All Japan Kendo Federation has approved. Kata uses a wooden sword, the bokuto. A kenjutsu school keeps its own curriculum, often with drawing the sword, paired forms, and actions a kendo match forbids, including sweeping the opponent's legs. Kendo has international team and individual shiai, and it has school clubs. Kenjutsu stays with the classical schools, and most of that practice is kata.

Manga and anime about kendo

Kendo turns up in anime because so many plots pass through a Japanese high school. A school club, a bukatsu, is a normal home for it, and kendo is part of physical education in Japan. A lot of those scenes are a few swings between other plot points. Series that stay with the club and the matches are rarer.

Takumu Mayuzumi, in Accel World, fights kendo and uses his acceleration to take bouts he would otherwise have to fight in ordinary time. The story spends most of its hours inside the accelerated game. For the daily life of a school kendo club, the one I can remember is Bamboo Blade.

Bamboo Blade

Kojiro-sensei, Toraji Ishida, the rather indifferent coach of the kendo club at Muroe High, is broke. His senpai, Kenzaburo Ishibashi, coaches Machido High and offers a bet: a practice match between teams of five girls. If Toraji's side wins, he can eat for a year at the sushi restaurant run by Ishibashi's father. Most of his own members have already graduated, so he has to recruit, and he finds Tamaki Kawazoe. With that bet in front of him, he begins to teach the club seriously. While he deals with the students who show up, he slowly rediscovers why he loves kendo and what it truly means to be a teacher.

Masahiro Totsuka wrote the manga and Aguri Igarashi drew it. Serialization started in 2004. The television anime, produced by AIC A.S.T.A., ran from October 2007 to April 2008, 26 episodes.

Other kendo stories

Musashi no Ken, the manga by Motoka Murakami and the television series that ran from 1985 to 1986, follows Musashi Natsuki from childhood into adult kendo, shinai in hand. Shinakoi follows Sakura, a kendo fighter who uses an unusually short shinai. If you sit down to a real match after any of these, watch the datotsu-bu land on men, kote, do, or the throat, and wait until two of the three referees agree before you count the ippon.